


Contamination

by thatsahottake



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Character Study, Dark, Mentions of Cancer, Tags May Change, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-01-27
Updated: 2021-01-27
Packaged: 2021-03-12 21:27:27
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,588
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29017386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thatsahottake/pseuds/thatsahottake
Summary: For seven years, Harry was mostly left to his own devices in the Unspeakables. Funding was abundant, his boss seemed pleased with his work (re: blowing shit up), and the paperwork was minimal. Life was good.Then Ginny got cancer and everything went to hell.
Relationships: Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley, Harry Potter/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 4
Kudos: 17





	Contamination

**Author's Note:**

> Loose plot developed, just working my way through how I think characters might behave or react to try to practice writing fiction. I'm a sucker for Tomarry and ran out of good ones to read, so I decided to write my own. First fic blah blah blah, it will likely have some shitty writing here and there. I'll try to avoid cliches and tropes, but since this is well-trodden grounds, I can't promise that. Regardless, enjoy ~
> 
> Any typos are likely due to my disability, but I do try to use grammar checkers.

There was a small part of Harry that really enjoyed blowing shit up.

Okay, so maybe it wasn’t so small. But taking the Unspeakable job after retiring from the Aurors was probably the second-best decision of Harry’s life (the first was, and always would be, proposing to Ginny). He went to work, he threw together magical artifacts, potions, almost forgotten spells in a secure room and wrote down what happened.  
  
Mostly, shit blew up.

Sometimes, though, Harry created Things, which he then took to another secure, padded room and tried to figure out what the Thing did. After that, the Thing(s) would be named appropriately and passed off to some junior-level co-worker to figure out the intricate details of why the Thing did what it did. For seven years, Harry was mostly left to his own devices in the Unspeakables. Funding was abundant, his boss seemed pleased with his work, and the paperwork was minimal. Life was good.  
  
Then Ginny got cancer.  
  
“Too much time in the sun,” their family Healer said. It made sense, of course. Ginny had been a chaser for a good two decades, spending countless hours outdoors. Harry vaguely remembered hearing about an azane layer and the sun being "too strong" back when he was young. Maybe that was why two of Ginny's freckles had morphed into dark growths. The Healer explained that Ginny should have been using sunscreens, something that Ginny admitted to forgetting about quite often. Harry asked for the cost of the potion that would cure Ginny’s condition.  
  
It turned out that the magical world was about twenty years behind the Muggle one when it came to certain diseases, cancer included. Ginny was to be treated via the Muggle immunotherapy and chemotherapy with supplementary potions to control symptoms. The combination of the two types of medical treatments often resulted in remission. So, Harry and Ginny visited the Weasley-Granger family and prepared for Ginny’s first appointment with a Squib doctor at a hospital on London's outskirts.  
  
Harry had embraced the wizarding world and never really looked back. His non-magical education was rudimentary. Hermione stepped in and introduce Ginny and Harry to the wonders of self-driving cars (which reminded Harry of another autonomous car so long ago), hologram communication, and robotic medical assistants. Hermione still regularly visited her mother, but as Undersecretary, she no longer had time to keep up with current events beyond the Daily Prophet and Wizarding Weekly. That meant that Harry was blindsided when the doctor said that Ginny was unable to be treated right away due to an overwhelming number of patients. Instead, she would be on a waitlist, and they would give Harry a call when it was her turn.  
  
He didn't understand. Hermione had assured Harry that cancer treatment would begin quickly. When Harry pressed the doctor as to the delay's cause, the doctor gave Harry an incredulous look that was quickly covered by a professional, neutral mask. The hospital system was strained, the doctor said, after numerous natural disasters, low funding, small but frequent breakouts of different viral diseases and cancers. Although Muggles had the capacity to treat most cancers with high success rates, that depended on proper manufacturing (from South America, affected by both droughts and flooding) and proper staffing (even with robotic assistants, staffing was down due to poor funding and limited because of the epidemics and large numbers of cancer cases).  
  
Harry turned his attention from blowing shit up to trying to cure his beloved wife. He transferred to a mixed team of Unspeakables and Healers. The team leader was two decades younger than Harry and twice as smart. Funding was carefully allocated to each team member. Every experiment was submitted to the team lead in advance. The team lead demanded a true research proposal, with a scientific hypothesis and reasoning as to whether the proposal would work. Any proposal good enough to be accepted would become the project of the week for two Unspeakables and two Healers.  
  
Harry had a one-month probationary period to show the team that he would be a valuable addition. However, after a career of tracking down criminals before tackling serious challenges like “What happens if I throw this potion at this plant?”, Harry was out of practice with writing. His first three proposals were rejected.  
  
One month after Ginny’s diagnosis, Ginny had started to complain of pain at night. Her tossing and turning woke him up multiple times a night, and Harry would end up pacing their hallway from the early hours of the morning to dawn.  
  
His fourth proposal (“If all limbs with signs of the disease are removed and then regrown, then the patient will be cured”) was denied (“Potter, I know you can do better than this. Maybe try again in six months.”), and Harry felt a cold chill settle into his bones. He was off the team. His old boss (“Cheer up, Potter, your regular testing rooms are still available!”) was thrilled to have him back.  
  
Harry couldn’t seem to find the same innovation as before That Day, though. Since he never got a proposal accepted, he never really got to take advantage of the knowledge of the other Healers and Unspeakables on the team. They were much further advanced than Harry, and Harry recognized that they didn’t have the time to transform his ill-thought proposals into something substantial. He requested a leave of absence from work and quietly began volunteering at a Muggle hospital on Monday and Tuesday and at St. Mungo's the rest of the week. Maybe he could learn something valuable that would help Ginny through this experience.  
  
Harry felt rather numb as the days passed, but he did his best to spend his weekends taking Ginny to nice restaurants, holding her hand, watching clouds, and visiting friends and family. Ginny herself appeared in good spirits until late at night when her bright smile fell, and she held Harry’s hand so tight that her nails dug into his skin and left marks for hours.  
  
Harry had to return to work at the beginning of month four since That Day.  
  
The Squib doctor still hadn’t contacted Harry through the advanced piece of metal Hermione gave him – “It’s called a comm, Harry, honestly” - that was somehow a TV, a phone, a computer, and chatty robot being all at once.  
  
Harry studied and learned. He studied Ginny’s slightly crooked smile and how wisps of her red hair, intermingled with silver here and there, fell out of her loose bun over the course of the day. He learned that the Muggle hospital was full of children and young adults, who were often placed higher on the waitlist than older adults. He studied the five different ways to brew a potion that prevented nausea. He learned how to cast diagnostic charms and conduct a physical. He studied how Ginny’s hands, showing the faint beginnings of age spots and fine wrinkles, fit perfectly in his own. He learned that there was something called “climate change” that was the cause of so many natural disasters and droughts. He studied the hologram textbooks the comm projected into the air for him to read, and he learned Muggle biology from lectures read aloud in a pleasant woman’s voice by the comm.  
  
But memorization was never his strongest suit, and his experimentation at work (adding unicorn horn to various potions to see "what if") was yielding none of the desired results. After a week of noxious fumes and explosions that for once brought him frustration instead of excitement, Harry realized that perhaps the team he had been on for a month was onto something with their proposal system. He paused his experiments and carefully wrote out a research proposal for a spell that would summon the cancerous cells out of the body. Maybe it needed a potion. Maybe he needed to figure out how to remove and regrow Ginny’s lymph nodes. Was there a system to combining spells and potions? He wished that he had done better at Potions.  
  
During month five, Lily moved back home to spend more “quality time” with her mother. On Fridays, Ginny, Lily, and Harry went to the Burrow for dinner, on Saturdays, Harry volunteered at St. Mungo’s, and on Sundays, James and Albus brought their significant others over for tea.  
  
During month six, the comm told Harry that two typhoons were heading for England. An outbreak of an unknown RNA-based viral disease that had thawed out from the last of the glaciers in Canada was threatening to escalate from an epidemic to a pandemic.  
  
And Ginny found a new lump in her underarm.  
  
Their Healer warned Ginny that she needed to start the targeted immunotherapy soon. Hadn’t they gone to the doctor yet? Harry tried to keep his voice steady as he explained the various obstacles, and Ginny had moved up on the waitlist, but it was simply so long, and the staffing hurdles so large with each additional disaster –  
  
Harry switched from volunteering at St. Mungo’s to at the Muggle Saint Francis hospital on Saturdays, hoping that an extra pair of hands would alleviate the healthcare workers' burden and mean more time for cancer treatment patients. He received certification to assist in triage, where he practiced casting _Episkey_ wandlessly and getting patients out of the hospital, off the list, making space for his Ginny… He treated children with broken bones and adults ill with hives down their back and across their chests. He treated a woman who showed up with a sliced finger and took up an entire hour of the hospital's time demanding x-rays even though the bleeding had long since stopped. Harry thought it looked like a bad papercut and told the woman his professional advice was to stay away from books and newspapers. The nurse he was assisting that day rolled her eyes, then blithely agreed.  
  
Lily told Harry that she wanted to help as well, and she was feeling cooped up. She decided to put her journalist curiosity to use and attend a Muggle college for healthcare administration. She thought she could turn her experience in Muggle higher education into a series for the Wizarding Wireless while investigating the waitlist problem at the same time.  
  
Harry had been picturing and mentally steeling himself for the possibility that Ginny would lie on a hospital bed in front of him, resting and slowly slipping away. It tormented him relentlessly, and he did his best to push past it and focus on Ginny in the here and now. He thought that was why it felt like a gut punch when, during month seven, he and Ginny were gathered at Lily’s bed instead as she slept fitfully, breaths slowly becoming more and more shallow. If only he had paid more attention to the current news on his comm. If only he had told Lily to take more precaution with the unknown virus spreading across Canada and the United States. If only the typhoons hadn’t meant that the British government accepted help from an American military supply ship nearby. If only those Americans were prevented from deboarding. If only, if only, if only.  
  
He and Ginny were asked to remain in their home and isolated from others for four weeks. Ron handled the funeral arrangements.  
  
The Potter Sunday family tea stopped.  
  
Month eight came and went.  
  
By month nine, Ginny wasn't able to finish her breakfast or dinner, and Harry often caught her doubled over and clutching her stomach. She had a constant headache. Harry returned to work.  
  
He spent 16 hours blowing shit up before going home. It permanently damaged one of his two secure rooms. He tried to study, he tried to learn, but the words swam before his eyes, and his head and heart were heavy. He and Ginny didn’t talk much anymore, spending their days in silence with passing touches. They had a row when Harry insisted on returning to volunteer at the Muggle hospital. It was one of their worst. They were fighting first about Harry’s potential exposure to the virus, but it digressed into who was a better parent to Lily. Harry couldn’t believe they were fighting about this. Ginny locked him out of their bedroom, and Harry slept on the floor next to Lily’s bed.  
  
Harry woke up feeling that Ginny would never get her proper treatment, and he needed to work. He had to solve this. Perhaps there was a way of preventing the cells from further mutating. He needed to reverse the cancer so far; he needed more time –  
  
And then he remembered, suddenly, a man whose head was stuck in a glass globe who went from man to elder to baby and back again in a continuous cycle. For the first time in two months, a spark of something jolted through him, and he apologized to Ginny and went to work.  
  
The time-turner collection had been repaired, but the globe that Harry remembered was nowhere to be found. He checked the archives, but whoever had first invented or found that artifact hadn’t bothered to take any notes on what it was or how to make it. (Harry suddenly hated the Unspeakables’ lax policies to “encourage creativity.”) He grabbed five time-turners, sat down at the office desk he bought and placed in the undamaged room, and started a new research proposal about combining a minor healing potion with the golden sand that glittered within each small hourglass.  
  
During month ten, Hermione’s mother passed away from the same disease as Lily. Hermione traveled to Muggle London with a bubblehead charm and a Notice-Me-Not charm to put her mother to rest. With her precautions in place, Hermione kept her business as short as possible before traveling back to the Ministry.  
  
Ginny started to sleep more during the day. She told Harry her head hurt oh so much. She was exhausted.  
  
During month eleven, a blizzard ripped through England, and the Ministry was shut down after several employees started to feel ill and developed a rash. A picture was in the newspaper. The rash reminded Harry of Lily.  
  
The Friday dinners stopped. Harry brought his work materials and old Things he had made to the basement and continued his research.  
  
Ron handled the funeral arrangements for Rose. A week later, Harry handled the funeral arrangements for Hermione.  
  
One afternoon during month twelve, Harry looked over at his wife, who was dozing on the couch while he prepared chicken risotto for dinner. He realized he could no longer see the rise and fall of her chest. He fell asleep clutching Ginny.  
  
In the morning, he tried to firecall his sons, Ron, but his fingers were as stiff _as Ginny when Harry woke up that morning from an awful smell, and Ginny had lost control of her bowels at some point, and did preservation charms work on the dead and would it have worked on Ginny, and now he needed to clean her up and oh Ginny, your sons, our sons, our daughter -  
_  
He threw up. He went down to the basement in a daze, and after a moment, and with a strength he didn’t know he possessed, he gave a wordless cry and upended his workbench, forgetting entirely about the small hourglasses and strange Things he had brought back from the office.  
  
He could sense a sudden light behind his closed eyes, then there was the deafening sound, and he felt hot; it was so hot, he was burning.  
  
Harry felt a split second of regret then –  
  
Tranquility.


End file.
